XFS

XFS is a high-performance journaling file system created by Silicon Graphics, Inc. XFS is particularly proficient at parallel IO due to its allocation group based design. This enables extreme scalability of IO threads, filesystem bandwidth, file and filesystem size when spanning multiple storage devices.

Repair XFS Filesystem

Online Metadata Checking (scrub)

Warning: This program is EXPERIMENTAL, which means that its behavior and interface could change at any time, see xfs_scrub(8).

xfs_scrub asks the kernel to scrub all metadata objects in the XFS filesystem. Metadata records are scanned for obviously bad values and then cross-referenced against other metadata. The goal is to establish a reasonable confidence about the consistency of the overall filesystem by examining the consistency of individual metadata records against the other metadata in the filesystem. Damaged metadata can be rebuilt from other metadata if there exists redundant data structures which are intact.

Enable/startxfs_scrub_all.timer to periodic check online metadata for all XFS filesystems.

Note: One may want to editxfs_scrub_all.timer: the timer runs every Sunday at 3:10am and will be triggered immediately if it missed the last start time, i.e. due to the system being powered off.

Integrity

xfsprogs 3.2.0 has introduced a new on-disk format (v5) that includes a metadata checksum scheme called Self-Describing Metadata.
Based upon CRC32 it provides for example additional protection against metadata corruption during unexpected power losses. Checksum is enabled by default when using xfsprogs 3.2.3 or later. If you need read-write mountable xfs for older kernel, It can be easily disabled using the -m crc=0 switch when calling mkfs.xfs(8).

# mkfs.xfs -m crc=0 /dev/target_partition

The XFS v5 on-disk format is considered stable for production workloads starting Linux Kernel 3.15.

Note: Unlike Btrfs and ZFS, the CRC32 checksum only applies to the metadata and not actual data.

Tip: When using the XFS filesystem on RAID devices, performance improvements may be possible by using largeio, swalloc, increased logbsize and allocsize values, etc. The following articles may provide additional details about those flags:

Access time

On some filesystems you can increase performance by adding the noatime mount option to the /etc/fstab file. For XFS filesystems the default atime behaviour is relatime, which has almost no overhead compared to noatime but still maintains sane atime values. All Linux filesystems use this as the default now (since around 2.6.30), but XFS has used relatime-like behaviour since 2006, so no-one should really need to ever use noatime on XFS for performance reasons.

Also, noatime implies nodiratime, so there is never a need to specify nodiratime when noatime is also specified.

Defragmentation

Although the extent-based nature of XFS and the delayed allocation strategy it uses significantly improves the file system's resistance to fragmentation problems, XFS provides a filesystem defragmentation utility (xfs_fsr, short for XFS filesystem reorganizer) that can defragment the files on a mounted and active XFS filesystem. It can be useful to view XFS fragmentation periodically.

xfs_fsr(8) improves the organization of mounted filesystems. The reorganization algorithm operates on one file at a time, compacting or otherwise improving the layout of the file extents (contiguous blocks of file data).

Inspect fragmentation levels

To see how much fragmentation your file system currently has:

# xfs_db -c frag -r /dev/sda3

Perform defragmentation

Free inode btree

Starting Linux 3.16, XFS has added a btree that tracks free inodes. It is equivalent to the existing inode allocation btree with the exception that the free inode btree tracks inode chunks with at least one free inode. The purpose is to improve lookups for free inode clusters for inode allocation. It improves performance on aged filesystems i.e. months or years down the track when you have added and removed millions of files to/from the filesystem. Using this feature does not impact overall filesystem reliability level or recovery capabilities.

This feature relies on the new v5 on-disk format that has been considered stable for production workloads starting Linux Kernel 3.15. It does not change existing on-disk structures, but adds a new one that must remain consistent with the inode allocation btree; for this reason older kernels will only be able to mount read-only filesystems with the free inode btree feature.

The feature enabled by default when using xfsprogs 3.2.3 or later. If you need writable filesystem for older kernel, it can be disable with finobt=0 switch when formatting a XFS partition. You will need crc=0 together.

# mkfs.xfs -m crc=0,finobt=0 /dev/target_partition

or shortly (finobt depends crc)

# mkfs.xfs -m crc=0 /dev/target_partition

External XFS Journal

Using an external log (metadata journal) on for instance a SSD may be useful to improve performance [1]. See mkfs.xfs(8) for details about the logdev parameter.

To reserve an external journal with a specified size when you create an XFS file system, specify the -l logdev=device,size=size option to the mkfs.xfs command. If you omit the size parameter, a journal size based on the size of the file system is used. To mount the XFS file system so that it uses the external journal, specify the -o logdev=device option to the mount command.

Troubleshooting

Root file system quota

XFS quota mount options (uquota, gquota, prjquota, etc.) fail during re-mount of the file system. To enable quota for root file system, the mount option must be passed to initramfs as a kernel parameterrootflags=. Subsequently, it should not be listed among mount options in /etc/fstab for the root (/) filesystem.